Weight Loss

muhammadwaheedaslam

I'm a beginner on this weight loss journey and I need support from my community. Are you guys ready to push me...

springlering62

hi @muhammadwaheedaslam

welcome to MFP

Asking people to “push you” is a big ask, especially from strangers.

When people push me to do anything, even when I’ve asked them to, I automatically dig in my heels and rebel.

How can you motivate yourself? Do you want better health for your future? Longevity? To spend time with spouse and kids? To care for parents? To be the “hot” guy on the dating scene? What would motivate you?

Can you create a habit? I love what someone here said yesterday about adding yourself to your phone calendar : 7pm Walk for Muhammad

Can you interest a friend or neighbor in meeting you at the gym?

It’s harder to cancel when someone is expecting you and you don’t want to be “that” person.

My neighbor walked me like a dog when she found out I wanted to lose weight. She was grateful for the company, I enjoyed getting to know her better, and it was there, on my calendar, four times a week, with time slotted in.

Are you a penny pincher? I’ve got an unlimited membership to my yoga studio. Before I branched out and started other forms
of exercise, I had a game with myself to make each yoga session as “cheap” as possible. I had gotten to the point was taking so many classes, I’d gotten the price down to $3 or $4 per class. Weird motivation, but in my head it was a game and it worked.

No one is going to stand behind you and push you for anything. I love my husband to death but if he pushed me to work out or lose weight, I’d have a fit of the screaming Mimi’s at him. That’s how my brain works, even if he’s doing it in an effort to support me.

There’s lots of tips on various threads about how to create habits .

Have a look around!

AnnPT77

Good thoughts from Spring up there.

I'll add another perspective: I think motivation is seriously over-rated.

I'm a hedonistic aging-hippie flake with a severely limited budget of motivation, will power, discipline or anything of that sort. I lost weight at age 59-60 after around 3 previous decades of overweight/obesity anyway, and have stayed at a healthy weight in the same jeans size for 9+ years since.

What I think is required: Commitment to stick with the process, patience, perseverance. Not constant perfection, though. Instead, just generally chipping away at remodeling routine eating and activity habits in a more positive direction. "Pretty good on average" works. Progress can be gradual, and that's OK. The time is going to pass either way.

Motivation, in particular, is a solo sport - here, I'm talking about motivation as the reason it's important for one individual to commit to the process. It's going to be different for everyone.

For me, that commitment was initially triggered by health issues. My doctor was threatening me with statins. I didn't want to take them because brain fog is a possible side effect, and I figured I'd already given up enough cognitive bandwidth to chemotherapy (for a cancer that would've been less likely if I wasn't fat and inactive, BTW). I'd already tried (and continued) regular exercise, I'd already tried modifying what I ate (poor job of it) without eating fewer calories, I'd already tried some medically-recommended supplements. Trivial or no progress on the cholesterol/triglycerides/blood pressure front from any of that.

Part way through weight loss, at age 59, I had my gallbladder out, not stones or sludge but another condition called adenomyomatosis, which can mask gallbladder cancer. When I got the pathology report, happily no malignancy . . . but it was an ugly, thickened, cholesterolized thing with actual holes in it. Yikes! That increased my commitment.

Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that my overweight, inactive friends - lovely people whom I value in my life - had on average much worse quality of life than my reasonably slim, active friends of similar age (also delightful humans, BTW).

The overweight, inactive people took more medications; had drug interactions from the multiple medications; couldn't safely eat/drink things they enjoyed because of the medical conditions or drug interactions; couldn't do fun things like stadium events or art/music festivals because of the walking/stairs involved; needed to pay money or enlist their children to do home chores the slim, active people could do themselves; got sick or needed surgery more often and took much longer to recover (if they even did recover); had less discretionary budget dollars because of medical and chores expenses; and generally had a long, unpleasant decline to an earlier death.

In contrast, the slim active people minimized those problems, and tended to live longer and more functionally before a short, sharp decline and demise.

I knew which lifestyle I'd prefer of those two paths, so I committed even more deeply to the weight loss process. That was my "motivation", my "why".

Once I committed to working on it, by which I mean repeatedly investing some of my available discretionary energy in it, I lost weight. Before that, I "wanted to lose weight", sure. But I kept making decisions about my behavior that kept me fat. Those decisions told me that I didn't really mean that I "wanted to lose weight". I was lying to myself, proving that through my actions.

Calorie counting with MFP was perfect for me because while I needed to change my habits, I could still find a way of eating that I enjoy that added up to reasonable calories. I could maximize my current self's enjoyment while still offering my future self a happier, healthier life. Win! It took some experimenting, chipping away at finding those new habits, and it wasn't a path of constant perfection, rather remodeling and improvement to make gradual, incremental progress.

I found I could make an easier plan, which required less motivation/willpower/discipline than the thing we see so often here: Some restrictive, much-hyped popular eating plan, no treats, all superfoods, no junk/fast/processed foods, whatever. Often people stack some punitively intense daily exercise plan on top of that. That kind of thing usually doesn't end well, but it does tend to end quickly. It's. Just. Too. Hard.

Many - not all - of the successful people here are more boring: They find an eating routine they like cut down on calorie dense foods like sugar soda/tea, deep-fried foods, and baked goods but don't necessarily cut them out totally; find ways to move more - daily life stuff or formal exercise - that's ideally fun, but is at least tolerable and practical. That's an easier route, IMO. "Find new permanent positive habits" is also a very different mindset from "lose weight fast".

I think you can do this. Give a good think to what would be a realistic, achievable path for you, and give similar thought to why it's worth investing energy in habit change to accomplish it. It may be simpler than you imagine: Not easy every single second, sure. But doable.

Wishing you success: IME, the quality of life improvement is more than worth the effort required to get there.